[OSM-talk] An open letter to OSMF board members.

Sat Jun 4 09:54:03 UTC 2022

Daniel, thank you very much for your voice in the discussion. Knowing your
commitment and contribution to the community is incredibly important.
Especially since you're a much better diplomat than I am and your talent
for building compromise should be right at home here.

sob., 4 cze 2022 o 03:14 Daniel Koć <daniel at koć.pl> napisał(a):

> W dniu 01.06.2022 o 19:26, Włodzimierz Bartczak pisze:
> > I am very sorry that an organization that pays great attention to
> > equal treatment and democratic management fails here.
>
> Thank you for bringing the issue to the public. And yes, this is sad and
> - as a matter of fact - very strange, that community driven project does
> not listen to the community.
>
> Disclaimer - I am an OSM Carto maintainer. And I don't understand why we
> have maintainers not following the community, even when confronted with
> so fluid entity being so disturbed, that it managed to take series of
> actions and speak loud about the frustration. Even now... I wonder what
> should have happened to make them listen?
>
> Although I don't know that, some problems are pretty clear. In general,
> there is where (1) a growing project meets (2) old habits, which were
> not touched for years - if ever.
>
> 1) Since OSM is growing, it is not possible to use one size to fit all
> (growing number of users an uses) and it's not easy to provide resources
> to support them (growing number of data). Raster map is never going to
> solve it - it is fixed and if you want a slightest change, you need to
> clone everything. In practice you need to make a separate style with
> rendering, which is costly and hard. The only viable technology that can
> overcome this obstacle is vector tiles with ecosystem of different
> styles, preferably with easy sharing+forking them and visual editor.
>
> It is not trivial with vector tiles, but with raster tiles this is just
> impossible. This might sound like a purely technical problem (new shiny
> vector toys!), but the consequences are social.
>
> 2) OSM Carto is an old incarnation of even older default OSM style. It
> has grown in a grass-root way - one person met another one and they made
> XML style for a small grass-root GIS project. 10 years ago that person
> converted it to something more clear and powerful using CartoCSS
> processor. Then he made a team of co-maintainers. At some point after
> that he wanted to left it to do some other things. He passed a
> coordinator job to one of the team members, but, unfortunately, that
> person was not able to do it - and so the project was left in some
> unclear state, and it is like this till now. There was some other
> problem at the same time - the team was doing less changes, so it was
> also failing at the practical level. And in the end maintainers as a
> team also started to diverge from community and I don't hear they see
> the problem or want to fix it somehow, simply nobody talks about it.
>
> This version of history is of course very rough (sorry for that), but it
> shows where did 3 main OSM Carto problems grown from - lack of guidance,
> lack of coding and lack of influence from the community.
>
> OSM Carto is default style, its tiles take most of the screen of the
> default OSM web page. This is a flagship and a public face of the
> community. I guess this is precisely a reason why we have no big red
> button "download database" instead, even if that's regarded as a
> strategic resource. Sounds like a community style then. It also renders
> and is being served using OSMF technical resources. -- But in reality
> the project is still hosted on a personal profile, that person is rarely
> active for years, and even if the code is being created by community, it
> is largely declined or ignored, so it looks like a typical small-club
> hobby, where you can walk in, but the chances that you can join it (or
> even just improve it the way you think is good) are basically non existent.
>
> So the OSM project has grown a lot, but governing model got stuck years
> ago and is not producing what community expects, slowly turning more
> into insiders discussion forum than a map style.
>
> Of course, even if we have vector tiles instead on the main page, there
> could be still conflicts which style should be loaded by default, but at
> least changing it and tuning to personal taste would be much simpler.
>
> I have nothing against small-club projects or personal forks. The
> problem is that until we have something more flexible in rendering OSM
> data, we have still one raster layer there and nobody knows how many
> years more it will take to expand it. So it sounds very obvious to me
> that default style layer should have been driven very clearly by
> community needs. And it looks like small-club is representing big
> community without even following it most of the time.
>
> I'm happy that community was able to talk how frustrated it is with the
> current state of the map (pun intended...). I'm also happy that OSMF is
> now aware of the problem and is thinking about possible solutions:
>
>
> https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Working_Group_Minutes/EWG_2022-05-23#Response_to_OSM-Carto_Frustration
>
> What worries me, is that OSM Carto maintainers still do not even talk
> about this. They are also still doing the same as usual, as if nothing
> happened and nobody complained. This looks to me like community
> representation is seriously broken here.
>
>
> --
> "Holy mother forking shirt balls!" [E. Shellstrop]
>
>
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-- 

Włodzimierz Bartczak

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